Chapter published in:
Persuasion in Public Discourse: Cognitive and functional perspectives
Edited by Jana Pelclová and Wei-lun Lu
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 79] 2018
► pp. 303–328

Persuasion in musical multimedia

A conceptual blending theory approach

I use the Conceptual Blending Theory to discuss the application of familiar music themes in unexpected contexts, where the music assists the image and text in swaying viewers’ opinion. A new interpretation emerges in such examples after two-tier conceptual blending. The musical themes initially integrate with the original (visual) context in listeners’ long-term memory, creating stable blends with predictable connotations. In the changed context, these blends become inputs in a new integration process, where the creators consciously play with listeners’ expectations: either by enhancing them, creating what blending theorists call the vital relation of analogy, or by disappointing them, creating the relation of disanalogy. I therefore integrate insights from cognitive linguistics and musicology in discussing the persuasive potentials of music.
Keywords: music, meaning, persuasion, conceptual blending, recursion, emergence
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 08 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.79.14ant
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